Vain: 1.1

Dr. Eleanor Vance had been practicing psychiatry for nearly fifteen years, and in all that time, she had never encountered a patient quite like Taylor Hebert.

The girl sat across from her in the standard issue plastic chair, hands folded in her lap, posture rigid. Her dark curly hair hung limp around her face, framing features that might have been expressive once but now were anything but. Her green eyes, behind those thick glasses, stared at Eleanor with the kind of blankness usually reserved for statues.

“So, Taylor,” Eleanor began, keeping her voice gentle, “how have you been sleeping?”

“Fine.”

One word. No elaboration. No follow-up. As usual.

Eleanor made a note on her pad. Patient continues to display severe emotional detachment. She had written variations of that same observation a dozen times over the past two months since Taylor had been assigned to her by the state following the incident at Winslow High School. The investigation was still ongoing, and the girl’s father had insisted on therapy.

But healing required the patient to want to heal, and Eleanor wasn’t sure Taylor wanted anything at all.

“Have you been having any dreams? Nightmares, perhaps?” Eleanor tried again.

“No.”

“Any changes in appetite?”

“No.”

“Do you find yourself thinking about the incident often?”

A pause. Brief, but present. “Sometimes. I try not to.”

That was the longest response Eleanor had gotten in three sessions. She leaned forward slightly, careful not to appear too eager. Progress, however small, was still progress.

“Can you tell me about those thoughts? What do you think about when you remember what happened?”

Taylor’s gaze remained fixed on some point past Eleanor’s shoulder, her expression unchanged. The fluorescent lights above hummed in the silence, casting everything in that familiar pallor that made even the healthiest patients look slightly ill.

“They’re just thoughts,” Taylor said. Her voice was flat, each word measured and delivered with the same cadence as the last. “They don’t matter.”

“Thoughts always matter, Taylor. They’re how we process difficult experiences.”

The girl didn’t respond. She didn’t shift in her seat, didn’t fidget with her glasses or play with the hem of her worn hoodie. None of the small movements that marked a living, thinking person.

Eleanor studied the girl across from her, searching for some crack in that facade. In her experience, teenagers were emotional creatures by nature. Even the quiet ones carried storms behind their eyes, flickers of feeling that emerged in the furrow of a brow or the tremble of a lip. But Taylor Hebert sat like someone had pressed pause on a movie, frozen in a single, neutral expression that never wavered.

It was deeply unsettling, speaking to someone who should be in the throes of adolescent turmoil only to receive... this.

It was also deeply saddening, the idea that someone so young could go through such an ordeal that it would reduce them to this state.

“I understand from your file that you’ve been spending a considerable amount of time alone in your room,” Eleanor said, consulting her notes. “Your father is concerned. He says you rarely come out except for meals.”

“I like being alone.”

“Most fifteen year olds don’t.”

“I’m not most fifteen year olds.”

The statement carried none of the defensiveness or irritation that teenagers struggled to keep out of their voice. It was a simple statement of fact. Eleanor resisted the urge to sigh.

“Your father loves you very much, Taylor. He wants to help, but he doesn’t know how. Neither do I, frankly. I can’t help but feel like you’re not really here with me right now.”

Taylor’s eyes shifted, finally meeting Eleanor’s gaze directly. “I’m here.”

“Are you? Because it feels more like I’m talking to myself.”

A flicker of something moved through Taylor’s expression, there and gone before Eleanor could identify it. The girl’s hands tightened around each other, just slightly, before relaxing back into their previous position.

“I’m here,” Taylor repeated. “I just don’t see the point in... feeling things right now.”

The statement was delivered with the same flat affect as everything else Taylor had said that day, but it stood out for its unusual length and candor. Eleanor felt a small stirring of hope in her chest. Finally, something to work with.

“Can you explain what you mean by that? Why don’t you see the point?”

Taylor remained silent.

Eleanor waited, giving the girl space, letting the quiet stretch between them, but nothing more was forthcoming.

Eleanor finally let the sigh escape her, before glancing at the clock on the wall. Their session was nearly over, and she had little to show for it besides a page of sparse notes and a growing sense of unease. She set her clipboard down on the desk beside her and folded her hands in her lap.

“Taylor, I want you to understand something,” she said, softening her tone. “What happened to you was horrific. No one should have to endure what you went through. The fact that you’re struggling to process it is completely normal—”

“I’m not struggling.”

The denial was surprisingly fast and delivered without inflection, but Eleanor caught the faint tension that rippled through the girl’s shoulders, the first notes of something human.

“Then what would you call it?”

Taylor didn’t answer. Her gaze drifted back to that distant point past Eleanor’s shoulder, and for a moment, the therapist could almost convince herself she saw something swimming behind those green eyes. Something deep and dark and profoundly sad.

But then the moment passed, and Taylor’s face returned to that unsettling stillness.

Eleanor let out a breath and reached for her schedule. “I think that’s enough for today. Same time next week?”

Taylor stood without a word, movements mechanical. She gathered her backpack from beside her chair and slung it over one shoulder, already heading for the door.

The girl paused with her hand on the doorknob, back to Eleanor. For a long moment, she didn’t move. Then, without turning around, she spoke.

“I can feel them.”

Eleanor blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Emotions,” Taylor said, still facing the door. “You asked earlier if I feel anything. I do. I feel all of it. I’ve just learned that it’s better not to.”

Before Eleanor could respond, before she could ask what that meant or why a fifteen-year-old girl had decided that feeling was something to be avoided, Taylor opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. The door clicked shut behind her, leaving Eleanor alone in her office with her notes and her questions and a profound sense of wrongness.

She stared at the closed door for a long time, that final sentence echoing in her mind.

I’ve just learned that it’s better not to.

What in God’s name was that supposed to mean?

~~~

Nights in Brockton Bay were usually cold, but something seemed especially frigid about this particular night.

The wind cut through the streets like a blade, whistling through alleys and rattling the loose siding of buildings that had seen better decades. The few streetlights that still worked cast pools of sickly yellow across cracked pavement, leaving vast stretches of darkness between them. No one with any sense wandered these streets after dark. No one who valued their wallet or their life, at least.

But of course, there were always those who didn’t have the luxury of common sense.

And then there were those who were the reason common sense existed in the first place.

Lung stood at the center of the intersection, surrounded by nearly two dozen men in red and green. His tattooed chest was bare to the cold night air, muscles coiled as he surveyed the gathering of his subordinates.

“—and if any of them try to run,” Lung continued, his deep voice carrying easily through the night, “you shoot them in the back. These children have been making nuisances of themselves, and it ends tonight. We will find them and end them as a message to everyone.”

A ripple of acknowledgment moved through the crowd. Then, somewhere at the edge of the gathering, one of the younger gang members noticed movement. He elbowed his companion, nodding toward the mouth of the alley where a figure had emerged from the shadows.

It was a girl, her head down and shoulders hunched. She was wearing a ratty hoodie and her hair was frazzled, covering her face completely. The men present eyed her with a mix of confusion and contempt, believing her to be just another homeless vagrant.

“Hey,” one of the gang members called out, breaking away from the group. He was a stocky man with a shaved head and a dragon tattoo creeping up his neck. Lung didn’t remember his name. “This ain’t a shelter, girl. Get lost.”

The figure didn’t respond. Didn’t even look up. She simply continued walking forward, each step measured and deliberate, closing the distance to the group with a patience that bordered on unnatural.

“I said get lost!” The man stepped forward, one hand dropping to the knife at his belt. “You deaf or something?”

That finally got a reaction. The girl stopped walking, but she didn’t look up. Her voice, when it came, was flat. Empty. Like someone reading from a script they didn’t care about.

“Are you going to kill kids?”

The question hung in the cold air. Several of the ABB members exchanged confused glances. The stocky man who’d confronted her frowned, his grip tightening on his knife.

“What the hell kind of question is that?” He spat on the ground near her feet. “Fuck off, crazy bitch.”

The girl didn’t move or flinch at the threat. She simply stood there, head bowed.

Lung watched the exchange from the center of his gathering. The confrontation had interrupted him, but he remained still, his eyes fixed on the strange girl who had wandered out of the darkness. There was something wrong with her movements and the way she held herself.

She finally raised her head, and Lung found himself staring into the emptiest eyes he had ever seen on a living person. Her face was plain, unremarkable. She was a simple teenage girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, with pale skin and dark circles under her eyes that spoke of many sleepless nights.

“I asked you a question,” she said, and her voice was directed at Lung now, cutting through the space between them as she addressed the man directly. “Are you going to kill kids?”

The ABB leader considered her for a long moment. He could feel his subordinates tensing around him, hands drifting toward weapons, ready to kill the girl. He wished to do the same, but something held him back. A whisper of instinct that had kept him alive through countless battles.

“Yes,” Lung said finally. His voice was calm, yet backed by a subtle edge. “They have stolen from me, and they will pay the price.”

The girl stared at him. Her expression didn’t change and her posture didn’t shift. If anything, she seemed to become more still, like a photograph of a person rather than the person themselves.

“Good,” she said after a long moment.

The word dropped into the silence like a stone into still water. Every gang member present froze, confusion rippling through their ranks. Had they heard that right? Had this homeless girl just approved of their plan?

Before anyone could question what was happening, the girl raised her hand to her face. She passed it over her features in a slow, deliberate motion.

For a single moment, nothing happened.

The ABB members stared at the girl, their confusion slowly giving way to unease as she stood there with her hand over her face. Then the shadows began to move.

It started as a darkness that seemed to bleed out from beneath her fingers, spreading across her features like ink in water. Her plain hoodie and jeans dissolved into inky black. The darkness grew, swallowing the streetlights’ weak illumination until the girl stood in a patch of absolute black that seemed to drink in the very concept of light.

The stocky man who had confronted her let out a strangled sound, his knife clattering to the pavement as he stumbled backward. The girl’s blank face and the mask that sat upon it had been swallowed wholly. What remained was nothingness given form, a void shaped like a human face that whispered of hidden depths.

Around that void, dozens of eyes blinked open.

They glowed with a sickly luminescence that cast no light, scattered across the darkness like stars in a corrupted sky. Each one was fixed forward, unblinking, and as the figure shifted, every single one of them seemed to track its own target.

One of the gang members screamed. And then another.

Lung stood frozen at the center of his gathering, his mind struggling to process what he was seeing. The creature that had been a teenage girl seconds ago now towered in a way that had nothing to do with physical height. Tattered darkness hung from its form in strips and waves, moving without any breeze, roiling under an unseen pressure.

A sudden feeling gripped Lung, an emotion that he hadn’t felt in ages. It was a feeling he thought he had long since put behind him, ever since he killed the weak man he once was and was born anew in flame and victory.

For the first time in years, the Dragon of Kyushu felt dread.

It gripped him, freezing the breath in his lungs. His vision tunneled, narrowing until all he could see were those eyes—dozens of them, hundreds of them, an infinity of glowing points that seemed to peer directly into his soul.

He tried to speak, to rally his men, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words. He tried to call upon his power, to let the fire rise and burn away the darkness, but the fear had wrapped itself around his throat.

One of his men fired a gun, but the bullet simply vanished into the creature’s form without effect. The darkness rippled, and the man who had fired let out a choked sob before collapsing to his knees, clutching his head and whimpering.

“Please,” he begged, though who he was begging was unclear. “Please, make it stop. Make it stop looking at me.”

More of the ABB members dropped. Some fell to their knees, others curled into balls on the pavement, and a few simply stood and shook, tears streaming down their faces. The fear was absolute, a primal thing.

Lung felt his own knees buckle.

He barely registered hitting the ground. All he could perceive were those eyes, watching him, judging him, seeing every weakness he had ever tried to hide. He had faced death countless times and laughed in its face. But this... he couldn’t fight this.

The creature drifted forward, darkness pooling beneath it like a shadow come to life. It passed among his men without touching them, and each one it approached let out a fresh wave of terrified sounds. Some screamed. Some begged. Some simply wept.

And all the while, those eyes remained locked onto Lung.

They watched him as he knelt on the cold pavement, watched as his fingers scraped uselessly at the ground, as every ounce of strength and pride he had built over years of conquest crumbled into nothing. He could feel its attention, and he wished more than anything that he didn’t have it.

For the first time in longer than he could remember, Kenta was afraid.

~~~

Taylor stood in the center of the street, her eyes blank and her chest heaving.

The night air was cold against her skin, but she barely noticed. She barely noticed anything, really. A ragged mask of green and black was clutched between her fingers, oozing power and emotion that she refused to feel.

Around her, nearly two dozen grown men cowered on the ground.

Some were curled into fetal positions, their bodies shaking with sobs that echoed off the brick walls of the surrounding buildings. Others knelt with their heads in their hands, making sounds that might have been words if they weren’t so twisted by terror. A few had simply collapsed where they stood, lying motionless on the pavement except for the occasional whimper that escaped their lips.

Lung—or at least the man she imagined was Lung—was among them. The feared gang leader, the man who had supposedly fought an Endbringer to a standstill, lay on his side with his hands clenched into fists around his ears. He shook, trembling as anger tried to break through the terror, but it was useless. She knew exactly what he was feeling: it was hers, after all.

The suffocating darkness of the Locker… insects crawling over her skin and into whatever part of her they could find, and a stench so foul that even opening your mouth to vomit was a laughable notion. All of the feelings that experience evoked and everything the memory dredged up since; he was feeling all of it. Lung may have had his pride, but pride was nothing in the face of such Dread.

The mask in her hand hummed weakly. Moments ago, it was the most powerful of her masks, but now the emotions inside were waning, used up and depleted. It wanted more fear and more terror to feed upon, but Taylor didn’t have any to provide it. Not anymore.

Taylor tightened her grip on the mask, and Dread vanished into motes of light. She surveyed the scene one more time. The men were still whimpering, still caught in the grip of the terror she had inflicted. Some of them would probably need therapy after this. Most of them would probably have nightmares for weeks. None of them would forget.

Taylor felt the smallest tinge of satisfaction that their fates would be as horrible as the ones they wanted to deliver upon those kids, but that emotion was offered up and eaten whole, leaving her with nothing once again.

Taylor’s power stirred in her mind’s eye. Shining beacons of feeling reached out to her, offering themselves to her. Not a single one was alike, but they all wanted the same thing.

Wear me, they said. Let me out. Take me in and feel again.

Taylor ignored it, just as she had every moment since she woke up in that hospital bed, stripped of everything that made her human.

Of everything that made her hurt.

Taylor turned away from the scene, ready to stalk back into the night, only to stop as she heard something approaching from a distance. She turned, her empty eyes watching as three massive shapes bounded towards her from the darkness.

A massive beast bounded out of the darkness on four powerful legs, muscles rippling beneath a hide that looked more like exposed muscle and bone than anything natural. It carried a vague resemblance to a dog, though it was the size of a car instead of anything resembling a household pet, and it was followed by two more just like it. Taylor watched them approach, her grip tightening on the mask in her hand as she prepared herself for another fight.

As the creatures slowed, she could see figures on their backs. Four of them, clad in costumes.

The one at the front wore a black motorcycle helmet with a skull design, darkness billowing out from beneath his form. Behind him rode a girl in purple with blonde hair and a domino mask, a grin on her face that Taylor could see from here. The third was a boy in a renaissance-style outfit with a scepter in his hand, while the fourth was a girl with a cheap plastic Halloween mask and a collar.

Taylor didn’t recognize them, but she recognized the danger they posed. She shifted her stance, one hand coming up just behind her body as her power flared to life inside of her.

A metal muzzle covered in barbs and thorns appeared between her fingers, biting into the skin and immediately drawing blood. It seemed to vibrate with suppressed rage, emotion gnashing against the walls of her mind like a feral animal, and if Taylor were capable of it, she would have winced.

But she was not, so instead she just eyed the approaching group, ready to defend herself if need be.

The beasts skidded to a stop several yards away, their riders dismounting with varying degrees of grace. The one in the skull helmet stepped forward first, darkness already pooling around his feet, but his posture was cautious rather than aggressive. He was assessing the situation, trying to understand what he was looking at.

“What the hell happened here?” His voice was low, deep, and came out slightly distorted through the helmet.

Taylor didn’t answer, nor did she relax. She simply watched him, her face blank as she waited for anything that would give her insight into what they planned to do.

The blonde girl in purple slid off her mount with considerably more ease than her companions. She moved to the side, getting a better angle, and her eyes swept across the scene. Taylor saw her eyes widen behind the domino mask as she took in the cowering ABB members, before they finally landed on Taylor herself.

Taylor had been the subject of intense scrutiny several times since she woke up from her coma, but never—not with the therapists or police detectives—had she felt like someone immediately saw through her at a glance.

The blonde stared at her, and Taylor watched as the other girl’s expression shifted. The curiosity faded into recognition, followed by understanding and finally something that might have been concern.

“Oh honey,” she said. “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”